Sneak peek into the new Ericsson Garage - Summer in the Labs

Meet students Gerda, Linnea and Sabah. They are working as summer interns at the soon-to-be-opened Ericsson Garage in Lund, Sweden. Read on to find out how they ended up there and who this “Calvin” is that everyone at Ericsson Research is talking about. Students from many different fields join Ericsson Research for internships or thesis work. You could be next. Follow our blog to learn about the students at Ericsson Research this summer.As more and more devices of different types become connected to the internet, there is a large demand to make them communicate. Today, cars, mobile devices, smart cities and even refrigerators can connect to the internet to share data and their capabilities. There is a need for a scalable and dynamic platform that standardizes protocols and an application execution environment. Calvin does exactly this. In Calvin, it does not matter if a device is a computer, car or a big server farm. Calvin enables them all to communicate with each other and lets them use each other's capabilities, while making it easy for developers to create distributed applications for the IoT by only having to specify a graph of how the nodes should be connected.

Jul 21, 2017

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What is your mission at Ericsson Research?

“Our assignment is to test Calvin and see how the application really works, and give feedback to the developers on the challenges of using Calvin,” explains Sabah. Calvin is supposed to be simple to use as it hides the complexity of connectivity and protocols for the user. None of the girls have had any encounters with Calvin before starting working with the platform, which made the project harder but also more interesting. "At first, we didn't have much knowledge about what the application was. It’s something that only the group at Ericsson Research here in Lund have been working on for the past few years.”

Are you really working in a garage?

“We are working in an office space called the Ericsson Garage here in Lund. It officially opens later this autumn but we are giving it a test run now during the summer,” explains Linnea. The Garage will host projects for Ericsson employees and companies to develop ideas. “The space is designed to inspire creative thinking and therefore doesn’t look like a normal office space”, adds Linnea.

Tell us about the application you created with Calvin.

“We have developed an application called The Talking Room. We wanted to use Calvin’s different parts and show the advantages that Calvin has compared to similar systems. That is, the ability to migrate components to different runtimes and the fact that Calvin is a distributed platform”, adds Gerda. The Talking Room is designed to provide updates about the room you are currently in by pushing a message to the user’s phone – these could be about the temperature, the number of people in the room, and if a plant needs to be watered. Once you leave the room, and enter another, the actors are migrated and you will get updates from the room you just entered. You will also be welcomed with a personal message – all triggered using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that you blip when you enter the room. “It was a challenging and stimulating experience,” says Linnea. “We are proud of what we have accomplished and were told by our supervisor at Ericsson that this is the application with most actors created in Calvin so far”.

Why did you choose to work at Ericsson?

Gerda, a student in Industrial Engineering and Management at LTH ended up in Lund three years ago when she moved from her hometown Uppsala. Her interest in technology and IT made her choose to study engineering, but she makes time for her other interests when she is not studying. “Much of my free time I spend in the kitchen, either trying on new challenging recipes, or baking sourdough bread,” she says. “This fall, I will go on an exchange to study in Montréal, Canada. I look forward to great experiences over on the other side of the Atlantic.” Linnea is currently studying in high school at Polhemskolan in Lund. “When I’m not working, or studying, I’m most likely working out or hanging out with my dogs,” she says. “I have always had a big interest in sport and have done everything from wrestling to athletics. It is not until the more recent years that I got interested in tech. I chose to study tech because my sisters are both engineers and they persuaded me to choose this route. Also, I didn’t need to read a second language when studying tech.”

Sabah moved to Sweden 12 years ago and lives in Rosengård, Malmö. She studies her last year of Science at Pauli high school. It has not always been a given matter for her to study tech. A YouTube video changed the course of her life and is also one of the reasons she chose to work at Ericsson Research. “Sometimes I’m surprised how I ended up getting into tech,” she says. “I’ve always had plans to study human rights as it was an important issue for me. Although I never thought I would choose this path I’m glad that I found an interesting video on YouTube that evolved around programming something that I had never heard anything about earlier in life."

Linnea and Sabah will soon start their final year at high school. How did they end up with the job at Ericsson?

Both girls got the job after visiting Ericsson during the Introduce a Girl to Engineering event created by the organization Womengineer, which aims to get more girls introduced to tech. During the event, they showed great interest and motivation, and was soon thereafter contacted by Ericsson, who offered them summer internships in the research department. Both are thankful for this opportunity while studying in high school. “Working at Ericsson this summer has been really fun because it has been a good mix of learning new things about Calvin and creating fun applications,” says Linnea. As they are both studying programming and tech in school they have experience in coding, skills that come well in hand at this project. Hopefully, this is just the first of many jobs in tech for them. “The job here at Ericsson has encouraged me to keep going and fight for my dreams,” says Sabah.

What are your personal goals with the summer internship?

All three see the internship as an opportunity to get a good view from inside Ericsson. Gerda, who will start studying her master’s degree in Software Intensive Systems this fall, sees the chance to evaluate Ericsson as a future employer while experiencing the working culture from within. For Linnea and Sabah this job might help them choose what to study at university. They are both interested in studying engineering in Lund. “Working at Ericsson has definitely helped a lot about what I want to do in the future with my carreer.” Sabah says. With the Calvin project, Ericsson aims to generate interest among girls for working in tech – something that all three believe has happened to them. “We all want to get inspired for our future lives in the tech world, while meeting driven and creative people in the industry,” concludes Gerda. Read more about Calvin here.

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